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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Trust me... If you've ever tried to cram a full size stand up bass, two very heavy bass speaker cabinets, an extremely heavy rack mount amp and pre amp, and my cranky old ass and personal gear into a sub compact, or a Prius, or a Civic, or whatever your miracle maxi mileage, mini car is, you'd have a mini van or a old Volvo wagon like I do, too... and you'd accept the not so bad 25 mpg (deductible at 50ยข a mile). There's more to "need" than vanity and 40 miles of bad road. As for public transit, or bicycles or whatever you utopian, vegi munchers are advocating to get to Starbucks in some urbanized, transited area, try catching the bus with the above equipment to... oh.... Cooke City, Montana, for instance.
Different strokes, etc...
While I agree that nonsense SUVs of old are useless dinosaurs for the most part, there are an awful lot of us, at least out west, who actually use and need bigger rigs for a whole variety of reasons.
Ummm. I can't believe that someone who has ever used an SUV would consider that a minivan has a space utilization problem. Not to mention that the minivan is the greatest bicycle carrying device ever invented.
Just try getting a bicycle into an Explorer.
Frank
They just don't want to call it that.
What you bought was a car based tall wagon. You can call it a "minivan" or you can call it a "SUV". What you have is something with unibody construction (probably based upon a Galant) and styled in a way to let people know you didn't buy a minivan.
I looked for a new car last year. I looked at the Toyota RAV4, and Honda Passport but ended up getting a Honda Odyssey (gasp!) minivan. Maybe its my complete lack of self respect, or my low manhood rating, but I bought the minivan because it was bigger than the car-based SUVs I looked at. It is also cheaper, handles better, accelerates faster, and gets better gas mileage. Yes, it marks me down as a suburban living, weekend grilling, "Hey kids, let's go crazy and buy some doughnuts!", typical, boring dad, but then that's what I am. I'm sorry my life isn't more exciting.
I have nothing personal against SUVs. In Australia, almost everyone has a Range Rover or some other big hulking machine. However, unlike in the U.S., each one of those Australian SUVs are scratched up and covered in a thick layer of mud. No one ever takes a Lincoln Navigator off the road because you will ruin the finish. Here in the U.S., you see a single driver driving back and forth from work driving in something that gets 11mpg. That's the problem.
It's not that SUVs are evil, its our propensity to buy cars not based upon a need or reason, but because we think they make us something we're not. Thus, we are convinced that we needed a gigantic car we can barely maneuver, that handles poorly, and costs a fortune to buy and maintain. It's a waste of personal and national resources.
Your car isn't inherently evil. It's all about getting what you need. You have a family to haul around, and most compact cars simply don't have the room to put both your kids and your bike in the trunk at the same time. Honest, I tried. You needed a people hauler and got something that gets reasonable mileage, is going to last quite a while, is comfortable to drive, and hopefully will be reasonable to maintain.
Enjoy it.
Mark is the third person that I have heard of recently who has bought a new vehicle, and all three bought imports (the other two were Honda and Toyota minivans).
Yet, it appears that the only mention of domestically produced vehicles is to hold them up as a target of disdain.
Surely there must be some examples of workable vehicles that are produced in the US.
After all, we just spent $25 billion to keep these companies from leaving a huge dump of coal in our collective stockings; when will the market follow through by purchasing (or even considering) their vehicles?
that brings up another piece of SUV weirdness; net weight payload capacity. not well documented in general, you have to subtract the actual weight of the vehicle from the GVW to get the max payload weight. and you find that a BMW x5 4.8, for instance, is rated at a net payload of 1200 lbs, even though it claims to seat 7. so, in fact, even with 6 medium large men aboard, you are at the manufacturer's rated limit; and if half a dozen middle management types were sent from company HQ to regional office for a meeting and decided to take this vehicle because they need the "capacity", they better not bring any luggage.
Volvo stopped putting 3rd row seats in their station wagon in 08 so as to push up the sales of their SUV the XC90. By doing this the only volvo model to have a third row seat is the SUV. You could have easily bought any used volvo with a third row seat, they in no way difficult to find. Furthermore, volvo has the built in booster seat and this would have come in handy given you haul your kid's friends around.
you sold out, pal. By the way, I have a bunch of bikes and two kids - though the dog died.
if you need a big truck, ford trucks are damn good. dodge and chevy/gmc big trucks have their fans as well, but i think the nod goes to ford. jeeps are still pretty well regarded for offroading.
then there's the american cars that gm actually gets from abroad; pontiac g8 from holden in australia and various cadillacs from opel and saab. quite well regarded.
but good small middle-of-the-road cars from america? scarce.
even though the manufacturers make and market them in other countries, apparently they are dedicated to the proposition that americans will only buy crappy small cars, so we don't get the well regarded european ford focus, for example, we get a homegrown pale imitation.
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